As promised, here is the first part of how I made this:
This post will mostly be focused on how I altered the model itself, the making of the base will come later.
Starting off, Amelia is from Mythic Articulations’ line of poseable skeleton figures (shop here). The whole line is 3D-printed in a lightweight, plain white nylon. Here’s what Amelia looked like originally:
The first step in getting her ready for colour was sanding. The way these figures are printed leaves them with a lot of print-lines and a pretty rough texture which you can kind of see on this unaltered hand below.
Because she’s so light, I’d thought she was quite delicate and only required a light sanding to get her smooth, but I was wrong. I had started with an extra fine grit sandpaper but ended up largely using nail files (jewelry files also work well).
I was also mistaken in how the material would take colour. I started out blushing her joints and crevices with brown chalk pastel and a fine brush but soon realized it was going to take forever to build up the colour to where I wanted it. The left leg has some chalk pastel, the right is still (blindingly) white. I wanted her to have a spooky, ancient look so I had to up the ante.
I graduated to using watered down burnt umber acrylic paint which the material took a lot better, again still focusing on the joints and seams between bones. Often I did a light wash with very watered down paint and used a paper towel or my fingers to remove colour from all but the lowest areas.
At this point however, I decided her colouring was a bit too warm for my taste, so between layers of brown washes I went in with some cool grey chalk pastels (when she was fully dry!!) to help neutralize everything.
Once I had the body pretty much where I wanted, I went in again with some burnt umber paint, still watered down but not as much as before, and set about darkening her hands, feet, eyes/nose, antlers, and around her teeth, still adding grey pastel to keep her overall colour consistent.
When outlining the teeth, I made sure to use a very small, ultra fine pointed brush (the one I used was the Tamiya modelling brush 87153) and built up the colour slowly with watered down acrylics, wiping off the excess from the teeth themselves.
After all this, a few of her ball joints were a little loose despite my best effort to leave them untouched. To remedy this, I just used a few coats of matte Mod Podge and boom, she was back to holding her poses.
After everything was dry and assembled, she was done! I sealed some of her more “high traffic” areas where I would be touching her more with matte Mod Podge but honestly the nylon is so absorbent that it wasn’t fully necessary, the colour soaked right down to the bone (lol).
Thanks for reading, and check back soon for part 2, making the forest base!
A recent project involving Amelia in her natural forest habitat. Still just a wip but I’m happy with how it’s coming along. I’ll be making a post showing how I made the base as well as the painting process on Amelia herself so stay tuned!
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